My Proms week was bounded by Mahler’s last two symphonies: the ninth, movingly intoned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, and Deryck Cooke’s realisation of the unfinished 10th, expounded by the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda. Between came the premiere, by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jac van Steen, of Symphony No 6 by David Matthews, who, with his brother Colin, helped Cooke in his reconstructive labours in the 1960s. And there were symphonies besides: such as Rachmaninov’s second, done by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Semyon Bychkov, and perhaps the outstanding performance of the week. Bychkov simply swept the orchestra away, compelled it to be as fine for an hour as any in the world,lusciously potent. It was sheer conductorly alchemy.

On the same programme was a recent piece, Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto, played by its dedicatee, Kari Kriikku, and this had a hardly less captivating performance. A volatile half-hour movement, packed with invention, the work is a plausible addition to the instrument’s repertoire, and, indeed, its opening solo tune seems to allude to the plangent clarinet pieces of Brahms, while the incorporation of a totally improvised cadenza is a classical gesture rarely encountered these days. Lindberg’s collaboration with Kriikku dates back to their madly extemporising Toimii! group of the early 1980s, and he must have felt that Kriikku’s ability to extract ideas from the score and throw them into the air was rock-solid. He gave us a truly pyrotechnical display, yet musical substance was manifest even as it burst into flames. And when that opening tune, recurrent throughout, took final form as a blazing tutti, one felt Lindberg had made a downright bid for popularity.

Matthews’s new work confirms him among our most conspicuous symphonists, as well as among our stalwart adherents of tonality. It is actually his ninth essay in the medium, for he had produced three before he began numbering them, and it is only right that he should look to his health, given the fatality rate of composers who have reached the ninth-symphony mark. Mahler followed his eighth with the symphonic Das Lied von der Erde, hoping to outwit fate, but still failed to complete his 10th.

Mahler’s sixth is one of Matthews’s acknowledged influences on his own, along with another “great, tragic” sixth symphony, that by Vaughan Williams. It is the hymn named after the latter’s Gloucestershire birthplace, Down Ampney, that provided Matthews with his starting point. In 2004, he wrote an orchestral scherzo based on it for the Three Choirs Festival, only to realise the movement could be the centrepiece of a symphony. To go with it, he devised a big-boned, vigorous yet tantalising first movement, modelled on the development-lite first movement of Bruckner’s ninth symphony, and an adagio finale whose double-dotted tutti climax seems a nod to the closing adagio of the Bruckner. Down Ampney unfolds more or less recog-nisably in a coda.

That’s a lot of pedigree for any Prom premiere, but does the piece live up to it? After several hearings, thanks to Radio 3’s excellent Listen Again facility, I feel it bids fair to. The argument is not only firm but interesting; the sensibility deeply serious but adventurous, too, far from slavishly conservative; and there are memorable felicities, such as the scherzo’s glittering, frenetic cadenza for vibraphone and marimba. It is indubitably a work to listen to again, even if its impact was inevitably dulled by the instant mastery of Ravel’s La Valse, coming immediately afterwards. Anyone can be eclipsed by Ravel. The profound spirituality indicated by the BBC Philharmonic’s Mahler 10 was a reminder that Matthews has in any case made an important contribution to the symphonic repertory.

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